Turning Away

The classical revival between the World Wars.

Illustrated history lessons: a still from Leni Riefenstahl’s “Olympia.”Credit COURTESY ARCHIV LRP

“Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918-1936,” at the Guggenheim, introduces us to dozens of unfamiliar artists from a time when the traumas of the First World War induced reactions that were termed “the call to order” in France, “the return to craft” in Italy, and “the new objectivity” in Germany. Most of the works aren’t very good. But, with the exception of some neoclassical paintings by Picasso (it’s hardly fair, how great he was) and a few odd hits, including the disturbingly beautiful prologue to “Olympia,” Leni Riefenstahl’s film of the 1936 Berlin Games, this show isn’t particularly concerned with aesthetic pleasures; it’s an illustrated history lesson, in thematic chapters. As such, it fascinates—and it’s timely. A trend in recent exhibitions—a show of nineteen-twenties German portraits at the Met, in 2006, and a revisit to the Bauhaus at MOMA and an Otto Dix retrospective at the Neue Galerie, both in the past year—looks beyond the standard success story of modern art to its untidy background of dashed hopes and tainted aspirations. We seem to be in a mood for tales of modern civilization under convulsive stress, and the more sinister the tales’ insinuations the more compelling they are.

As many as fifteen million people, nearly half of them civilians, perished in the Great War. That disaster has been largely occluded for us by the still worse events that were to come, but it cannot be overemphasized as a spur to the cultural and political developments of the next two decades. The show’s chief curator, Kenneth E. Silver, a professor of modern art at New York University, makes that plain with a selection of etchings from the suite “War” (1924), by the redoubtably grisly German Dix, who served as a machine gunner on the Western front. Corpses pile up and molder; madmen grin. Silver frames everything else in the show as a turning away from that awful reality, toward restorative myths and redemptive ideas. We are used to accounts of the period which celebrate the attacks of Dada and Surrealism, among other avant-gardes, on the societies that had hatched the horror. Those movements are excluded here, to give a clear view of the more widespread and popular efforts to re-ground social morale on the bedrock of the past. Greek and Roman antiquity, in particular, inspired a fervently nostalgic classical revival, with many varied currents—which was poisoned when Hitler later co-opted it as the house style of the Third Reich. The revival spread to Russia and America, but Silver focusses on the three nations where its expressions and consequences were most dramatic.

The show begins with a Picasso painting, “Bust of a Woman, Arms Raised” (1922), which presents its serenely noble, primitively clad subject all in grays, as if she were made of stone. (But this is Picasso, so she simmers.) Parisian artists took the lead in neoclassicist style, as they had in prewar innovations. They could draw on a long French tradition of classical tropes, ranging from sixteenth-century Fontainebleau to Poussin, David, Ingres, and, more recently, Puvis de Chavannes and Aristide Maillol. (The show’s one sculpture by Maillol understates his prominence, in the twenties, as a public artist who made the sensual female nude a symbol of national character, with nuances both earthy and exalted.) But many French responses to the moment feel mainly clever, as in three paintings by Fernand Léger which fold classical references into his upbeat late-Cubist manner. And France spawned the frozen hysteria of Purism, a movement, led by Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, which produced industrial-looking, clean-lined semi-abstractions of still-life and architecture, and preached a spirit of chipper denial. “Poor, heroic soldiers, hard task of fighting!” the noncombatant Ozenfant wrote in L’Élan, a magazine that he founded and edited, in 1915. “But when you fall, lamented ones, wouldn’t it be better to turn our backs? Faced with agony, the civilized pull the curtain.” With that attitude, the civilized weren’t going to know what hit them not too long afterward.

Germans and Italians favored grittier stuff. Art scenes in both countries were galvanized by “The Return to Craft,” an extraordinary essay by Giorgio de Chirico which appeared in a prominent Italian art magazine in 1919. An avant-garde celebrity, soon to be acknowledged as the leading initiator of Surrealist painting, de Chirico abruptly urged painters to “go to the statues. Yes, to the statues, to learn the nobility and the religion of drawing, to the statues to dehumanize you a little.” In other words, reject hot little prewar values of personal expressiveness, formal ingenuity, and progressive taste. Embrace cold, big values—needed by a civilization that has lost its way—of self-abnegating technique, timeless truth, and universal appeal, which traditional statuary ideally symbolizes. In a circa-1922 self-portrait painting that is not in the show, de Chirico poses with a sculptural bust of himself—a conceit amplified by the German Julius Bissier, in 1928, with a portrait of an artist whose features are exactly repeated in the clay head that he has made. Forms of figurative sculpture became the epoch’s artistic tuning fork. (Picasso carried them over into his Surrealist works of the early thirties, and they informed the style of Balthus, whose great 1933 painting “The Street” stars in the show.) Like such other formerly radical Italian artists as Carlo Carrà and Gino Severini (and even the saintly still-life painter Giorgio Morandi), de Chirico maintained an ambiguous stance toward Italy’s relatively permissive Fascist regime. He took to painting patriotic themes of ancient Roman warriors and the like, but, wittingly or not, he made them ridiculous.

Idealizations of the young and perfect—the unmaimed—human body swept Europe. At the Guggenheim, Dix’s pictures of shattered soldiers are surrounded by handsome German and Italian statues, whose updated-antique styles give way, as the show unfurls, to sleek Art Deco variants and grandiose Fascist exaggerations. The stubby Mussolini becomes a titan, with shoulders nearly five feet wide, in a 1925 bronze bust by Adolfo Wildt, and he goes hyper-modern in Renato Bertelli’s “Continuous Profile of Mussolini” (1933), a lathe-turned head that looks the same from every angle. A vigorous male nude made in 1935 by one of Hitler’s favorite artists, Georg Kolbe, appears poised to throw a right hook at the viewer’s head. Riefenstahl’s smoke-enhanced slow pans, fades, and double exposures of classical sculpture, intercut with shots of temple architecture at Olympia and the Acropolis, climax with a view of a Roman copy of Myron’s “Discus Thrower.” The stone becomes flesh in the person of a naked German athlete, who launches the missile into what the majestic music of Herbert Windt portends to be a wondrous future. The film’s intimidating grandeur acquires a seriocomic antidote in a sequence from Jean Cocteau’s terrific “The Blood of a Poet” (1930): the manly hero receives advice from an armless Venus that comes to life (Riefenstahl must have seen it) and which he then smashes to plaster bits.

“The new age of today is at work on a new human type,” Hitler declared in 1936, setting forth perhaps the definitive delusion of twentieth-century tyrannies. To square the novelty with classicism, he convinced himself that the Periclean Greeks were, somehow, Nordic. The new men would be that race of heroes reincarnate and, incidentally, aggrieved by the Treaty of Versailles. The most direly riveting item in the show is “The Four Elements: Fire, Water and Earth, Air” (circa 1937), a triptych by Adolf Ziegler, which hung above a mantel in Hitler’s Munich headquarters. Four realistically rendered young female nudes display the eponymous attributes while seated, with swaths of drapery, on a long pediment. A Renaissance pastiche, the work is marred by its overly persnickety verisimilitude and by the squirrelly attitudes of the models—as if neither they nor the painter knew quite what was expected of them—but it is delicately done in an over-all shimmering harmony of subdued yellows and blues.

The first of the show’s abundant wall texts posits “regenerative order and classical beauty” and “rational organization, objective values, and heroic embrace of the human figure” as the shared principles of the art of the time. There they all are, just a bit stiffly realized, in the Ziegler. You couldn’t want a more interesting, and distressing, conversation piece, apropos of conundrums of art and politics and aesthetics and morals—if you happen to want that at all. ♦

Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic.